


Let The Sunshine In

by silverskyfullofstars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hair (musical) - Freeform, High School Theater, Multi, Theater AU, god I know Hair is a ridiculous musical, just wanted to see how you guys react, this is just a tester chapter so the tags are pretty sparse, when I get more chapters done I'll add more
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 00:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15183050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverskyfullofstars/pseuds/silverskyfullofstars
Summary: Bucky likes high places. Places with vantage points, with handholds, with ledges for feet to dangle above empty air. The theater catwalks are the best. Black-painted corridors lined with metal railings and covered in lights. Lights, those are easy. Circuits and wires and light bulbs and painstakingly labeled lenses, all controlled by switches and slides.





	Let The Sunshine In

**Author's Note:**

> This is a tester chapter for a longer Stucky theater AU I'm trying to write. Essentially, I had so much fun working tech for a production of Hair that I started thinking about how Bucky would love working lights, and my planning for this fic started.
> 
> PLEASE give me feedback if possible! I think I'm having some trouble with tense.

Bucky likes high places. Places with vantage points, with handholds, with ledges for feet to dangle above empty air. The theater catwalks are the best. Black-painted corridors lined with metal railings and covered in lights. Lights, those are easy. Circuits and wires and light bulbs and painstakingly labeled lenses, all controlled by switches and slides.   
  
Lights are easier than people. Lights are complex, but the good kind of complex. People are complicated.   
  
He can see people, down on the stage. The actors, the singers, the dancers, bathed in darkness, color, and light. Blue, pink, purple, white, gold. He loves the warm gold, but the soft, cold blue is his favorite, dotted with white stars.    
  
The music wafted up to the rafters and catwalks, and Act 1 began.   
  
-   
  
Steve likes stable places. Tables and chairs and sound equipment and supply closets filled with extra batteries, binders, scripts, and the odd wig or two. He likes being called down to the green room to change batteries, despite the constant running and the high volume. He likes double-checking that the mics are working properly, likes rolling up the cords and organizing the belts and putting boxes on labeled shelves.

 

Steve likes the booth, because it’s constantly filled with people. His chair is between Loki and Scott, and occasionally, Bruce and Mr. Coulson will make eye contact with Loki to time the lights, background changes, and music correctly. Yeah, their machine isn’t super well-oiled, but it works, and it’s fun. 

 

Then, the yelling started.

 

-

 

Bucky was super confused. A second ago, the cast was practicing “Going Down” (and doing pretty well, in Bucky’s opinion), but suddenly there were a bunch of people buzzing around backstage and three people were shouting at Fury that they need to pause the show. Finally, someone got a word in.

“Someone left a trapdoor open backstage and Tony fell in!”

“Is he ok?” Fury barked back.

More movement backstage, and a stagehand hurried over to close the trapdoor.

“Everyone go to the greenroom, I can’t hear what’s going on!” Fury shouted. Students retreated, but a few lingered.

“Now.”

The rest scurried off, and Tony Stark hopped downstage from behind the stage left curtains, supported by Peter Quill. 

“What happened?” Fury sounded harsh, but to the kids who’d been there for years and knew him well, he was obviously concerned.

“Well, uh, it’s pretty dark backstage, and I was trying to get into the shop and suddenly - whoosh! No ground.” Tony made it seem funny, but from Bucky’s vantage point, he was definitely limping.

“Are you injured?”

“I don’t think so… it’s probably just a twisted ankle.”

“Alright then. You watch that ankle, though. I had a similar injury once, and it took a long time to heal. Do your lines from the front row today, and keep the ankle iced and elevated. Rogers, what are you doing on stage?”

 

Bucky had been tuning out the medical recommendations, but he looked down again at the mention of Steve Rogers. Sure enough, the skinny kid was onstage, carrying a bag of ice.

“I figured Tony’d need ice, Mr. Fury.”

“Thanks for the quick thinking, Rogers. Peter, help Tony off the stage if he needs it,” Fury answered, shifting his attention.

_ Oh boy _ , Bucky thinks,  _ this musical’s off to a great start _ .

  
\---

 

Bucky first started doing lights his second semester of sophomore year. Legally Blonde, the spring musical, went great, but Our Town, the play for the fall semester of junior year, was the boringest shit he’d ever seen on stage. The only cool thing about it was the rectangular light meant to look like a coffin. He could quote that goddamn speech - “ _ I can’t! I can’t go on! It goes so fast, we don’t have time to look at one another! _ ” Yeah, the actors had done a great job, but he’d literally fallen asleep at the light board. During a show. With an audience. Not a great claim to fame.

 

At least Hair was interesting enough to keep him awake. In truth, it was more the awkwardness, sex jokes, and blatant racism (thanks, 1968) than the actual plot that held his interest. It was kind of like watching a car wreck - he knew he should look away, but he was riveted nonetheless. And now he had the Black Boys/White Boys scene stuck in his head as a result. Truly disturbing.

 

But Bucky really did love his job. Yeah, it set him back a couple hours on homework, but that was a small price to pay for three hours in a theater every weekday. God, he loved the theater. He knew its ins and outs, from the farthest stretch of the catwalks to the crawl space under the stage (where he technically shouldn’t be, but the stagehands had found a sofa down there last year, and it was comfy as hell). 

 

The other people there weren’t as cool as the theater itself, but they were nice. Bruce Banner, who was in charge of the light board, was a calm, easygoing guy. Last show, he’d taught Bucky how to run lights, but because of the complexity of the light cues for a musical versus a play, he was taking over for this production. The rest of the people on lights - all juniors, Bucky included - would be up in the catwalks during the shows, moving the follow spots. Clint Barton, one of Bucky’s fellow lights people, was a pretty nice guy, though a little food-obsessed. He and Bucky bonded over a love of lights and vending machine fruit snacks last semester. The other kid on lights was Leo Fitz, a shy junior who went by his last name and generally hung around the same friends he’d had since freshman year. He and Bucky weren’t super close, since Fitz had only just joined tech, but they were friendly to each other, and Bucky was impressed by Fitz’s skill with the lights, rivaled only by Bruce and the director.

 

Bucky had some friends in the cast also (well, really just Natasha), and he got along fine with the other techies. All of the stagehands downstairs were nice, but they didn’t hang out with him a lot. Pepper Potts, the stage manager, usually had too much to do, and the stagehands - Peter Parker, Wanda Maximoff, and Pietro Maximoff - were usually off in some corner or another, doing anything from organizing props to throwing Skittles at each other. Scott Lang, the soundboard guy, was pretty cool. He planned on majoring in electrical engineering in college, and was great when it came to fixing random problems with the sound equipment. Jemma Simmons, Fitz’s best friend, was one of Scott’s helpers. Since Hair was her first show, she generally worked wherever she was needed, even helping stage crew on occasion. Loki Laufeyson, another junior who was a bit of a recluse, usually claimed the laptop that controlled the music and sound effects. He could be a little rude sometimes, but he did his job well. There was also that one time his adoptive brother brought a box of cookies to the greenroom door. Apparently Loki didn’t usually celebrate his birthday at school, so in an attempt to remedy that, all the techies had gotten chocolate chip cookies courtesy of Thor The Rugby Player. Bucky wasn’t a huge fan of how loud Thor was, but the cookies were good.

 

The last person who regularly worked in the tech booth was Steve Rogers. Steve was a sophomore, and he was in charge of the many body mics and the two handheld mics used during the show. Bucky barely knew Steve, but he knew they had a few friends in common. Natasha Romanov, actress extraordinaire, knew every person even remotely related to the drama department, and Bucky had formed a good-natured spirit week rivalry with Sam Wilson, one of Steve’s closest friends. If Bucky were being honest, that might’ve been an attempt to approach the cute sophomore with the blond hair and the eyes that looked like a blue sky just before a storm. Just maybe. But who would know?

 

-

 

Steve’s first show doing tech was Our Town. During his freshman year, he hadn’t known that it was an option, and on top of that, he’d had to go to the hospital again that September. The makeup work and the general stress of his first year of high school kinda killed any desire to take on extra work. But after a lazy summer of doing not much at all, he decided he could do a little more. 

 

Joining stage crew had been suggested by Peggy Carter, of all people. Their mothers had been friends for years, and despite the difference of two years, Steve and Peggy had become such good friends that some people even assumed they were dating. As if. Peggy had had a girlfriend for a year and a half, a girl named Angie she had met while working as a counselor at the local theater camp. Peggy’s elective was drama, and had been acting since her freshman year. When Steve said he was looking for a hobby, she mentioned that one of the people doing sound had graduated, leaving a space that needed to be filled. Steve popped his head in during the next rehearsal, and after a quick conversation with the director, he was signed up for tech for the next show.

 

Steve liked theater, but he quickly decided that Our Town was one of those plays most people leave feeling bored out of their minds. There were fun parts, though. Changing people’s batteries meant he got to meet most of the cast members, and he even made some friends down in the green room. For the most part, though, he hung out with the other techies. The people in the booth cycled out less than the people backstage did, mostly because they knew how to work the equipment. Anyone could move scaffolding with the help of a competent stage manager, but light and sound had to be taught. 

 

Bruce and Scott worked the light and sound boards, respectively. Both would be graduating in June, but there was discussion about Scott being hired after he left the school. His college was pretty close, so it might not be too far-fetched of an idea. Steve didn’t know a ton of the seniors, but they were pretty nice, especially considering that most of the people in their grade - even the others in the production - tended to forget that underclassmen existed. Loki usually manned the laptop with all the music and sound effects, and Bruce had three juniors to move the spotlights and occasionally fill in for him when he was absent. Steve didn’t really know any of them, since they were all a grade level above. Jemma, one of the new techies, said her best friend would be working lights, but Steve hadn’t had the chance to meet him yet. Steve had met the other two juniors, but Clint and Bucky didn’t really run in the same circles Steve did. Steve mostly hung out with the art kids and a few friends from middle school or his classes. Clint somehow managed to be sports-obsessed while not playing any school sports, and Steve made it a point to avoid the jocks, but he was friends with Natasha, so Steve “knew” him as a friend-of-a-friend. And fine, maybe Clint wasn’t the bad kind of athlete, but some of the kids he hung out with were the same ones who tried to beat Steve up in the back parking lot.

 

The other lights kid, Bucky, was also one of Nat’s friends. Natasha didn’t talk about him much, but Steve knew they hung out a lot. When Nat wasn’t at home or with Steve, she was probably with Bucky. According to Nat, they were learning Russian together online, even though Nat was already taking Mandarin as her required language class. Steve thought that was way too many foreign alphabets, but hey, to each their own. And if he also thought that the way someone’s hair fell across their face when they hunched over their phone was worth a sketch, or the shape of someone’s lips around a foreign, icy, snow-filled language was worth a painting, well. Who would know?

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so if you know anything about Hair, you know that it's kind of an inappropriate musical. There's a lot of drugs, a lot of sex references, and a lot of racism, since it was first performed in 1968. I just wanted to let you know that I am aware of that stuff, and I'm going to try to be as conscious of how delicate those subjects can be as possible.
> 
> I picked Hair as the show Bucky and Steve work tech for because I worked tech for it, so I can portray rehearsals as accurately as possible. Also, the music is good, and if you get past the weird parts, it's pretty funny. And rest assured - the production I did did NOT include the nude scene, and neither will this.
> 
> Also, if anyone's wondering why Thor plays rugby, it's cause I have a friend who plays and it's a little nod to her.
> 
> Inspiration picture: https://silverskyfullofstars.tumblr.com/post/175592544580/inspiration-picture-for-the-first-chapter-of-a-fic


End file.
